Walking Dead Covert
by lonelywaldorf
Summary: Reunited, the group start to build a new life. But even the most idyllic havens can hold danger.
1. The Journey Begins

Before you read this story, please read and review my others that come before this.

s/7037826/1/Walking-Dead-These-bonds-that-link-us

s/7119525/1/Dead-Winter

s/7449438/1/Walking-Dead-The-Road-Less-Travelled

Running in the same time frame: s/7992901/1/Two-Sides and s/8036915/1/To-Every-Story

I still haven't even seen Season three all the way through yet, so although I include characters from the TV Series, I mainly use the comics. I hope I haven't lost my touch!

Georgie

Hot. It was too hot. The sweat was running down Georgies neck, soaking the back of the checked shirt she'd taken from Daryl. Her hair was sticking to her neck, checks, forehead, and the horse she was riding on was snorting impatiently. She could feel the heat radiating from it. She knew that the horses needed to rest and that they all needed to stop and take a break from what must be the midday sun, but she couldn't bring herself to voice the suggestion. She didn't want to take any longer than necessary to get to the town that T-Dog and the others had come from. Being separated from the people she had lived with for so long had hurt almost to the point of physical pain, and she didn't see why she should have to bear it any longer. T-Dog had been allowed to accompany her to the town, and his solid presence was the only thing that stopped her from racing her horse in the general direction he had pointed out to her. Adele and Daryl had been made to stay behind with Craig. Her initial thoughts had been that Ivy didn't trust her to come back, the real reasons made themselves clear.

Matthew was still incredibly weak from his stint in town. Although he was now on a drip, and rehydrated, he still was sleeping most of the day. He was also being placed on some very strong medication for his eye, in an attempt to clear the milky whiteness of the scaring and perhaps regain some sight. Jack had flat out refused to allow him to leave. Him, or Craig, or Adele. Adele's hit to the head was significant enough to warrant prolonged observation, and Craig had been identified as under nourished. And as for Daryl.

At first she had though Daryl was in some sort of shock. Shock from thinking someone was dead and then seeing them come back to life. Then, she worried that he was actually sick, that he had some sort of disease. But Jack had diagnosed him with something else. The sweating, the shaking hands, the nausea. Daryl was suffering from alcohol withdrawal. At first Georgie had refused to believe it, but conversations with Adele soon proved her wrong. She didn't tell her all of it, but she knew her friend well enough to be able to read between the lines. And so Ivy, along with the other elders, had decided Daryl was not yet well enough to travel with them.

Lost in her own thoughts, she started when she felt a hand close over hers on the reins. Michonne gently tugged at her hand.

"Time to rest. And you should tie your hair up." She untied a bandana wrapped around her wrist and leaned over to Georgie. Expertly, she twisted her hair into a loose bun and tied the bandana around her head, tucking loose hairs in and placing a wide brimmed hat on top. "You'll catch sunburn if you're not careful." She shared a rare but brief smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners for a fraction of a second. "Come. Sit under the tree. Rest your horse." Georgie nodded and turned the horse back.

The others had already dismounted and were in the process of removing saddles and bridles or walking their horses. Georgie reached down and felt the foreleg of her own horse. It was almost dripping with sweat.

"Whoa, sorry girl. Guess I didn't think of you being overheated in this weather." The horse shook its head, as if to say, 'Well that's all right, but can we now get on with cooling me down?' Sliding off the horse and lead it to the tree.

"You were off in your own little world over there. You ok?" asked T-Dog.

"Yeah…"Georgie started to brush him off, but one look from T-Dog and she remembered that this was a man who knew her inside and out, who she knew inside and out, and the normal response she would give Michonne, or Zxander or anyone else wouldn't fly with him. "No. Not really. I just…I just want to get there. See everyone. Reassert my existence." She tried to laugh at the last part, but it struck far too close to home.

"It's not that far. One day, two tops. Didn't take us that long to get to the city where we met up, and then it wasn't that long to your place so, yeah. Two days tops."

"Ok then." Georgie turned away to face her horse so that no one, especially not T-Dog, could see her face and guess how uneasy she felt. The sooner she could see Andrea, Sophie and the others, the better.


	2. Closer

T-Dog

T-Dog had never travelled by horseback before, and he didn't think it would be a mode of transport he would willingly take again. His back side hurt like a son of a bitch, and he was pretty sure his horse was snickering at him. And that it was jolting his already sore behind deliberately. He clenched his teeth and tried to sit up straighter.

"Don't worry, you'll get used to it." Zxander rode up next to T-Dog, smiling good naturedly.

"Oh yeah? How long did it take you?" Zxander grinned even wider.

"Oh it still hurts. I just don't care anymore." T-Dog scowled. That was not the news he had hoped to hear. He was trying to think of a witty retort to this, when he suddenly realised that their surroundings were becoming familiar. Even though they hadn't come the direct route, through the city, they had still ended up back at the truck that they had abandoned outside the city.

"Hells yes." He all but jumped off his horse and ran to the car. The wires to the ignition were still hanging out, ready for an emergency start if necessary. "We're an hours drive away. We just start the engine and we're there."

"How many of us will actually fit into that…thing?" It was Bella who was talking, the smaller darker haired girl who was part of the group that Georgie had integrated into. T-Dog hadn't really had chance to get to know any of them, beyond what Georgie had told him. Right now, she was looking at the truck as if she felt the same way about it as he did about his horse.

"Well, it held four of us on the way down, and there was room for another."

"Well, there are seven of us now, and four of us are pretty…large shall we say?" T-Dog nodded unhappily. Behind Bella, he could hear Dayo mutter to Sayid

"Did she just call me fat?" Sayid nodded gravely.

"You and Zxander. Too much goat." He patted Dayos stomach. Dayo pushed it away and flipped him the bird.

"We're not all going to fit in there." Bella frowned. "I don't think it's a good idea to split up."

"If it's only an hour away by car, it won't be that much longer by horse." Zxander reasoned. "T-Dog, Georgie and one or two of us go in the truck. The others can follow behind if T-Dog gives us clear directions. It won't be that big of a deal, especially if T-Dog warns the others that we're on our way. Probably be less threatening as well. What do you all think?"

"Suits me." Georgie slipped off her horse and strode to the truck, obviously eager to be on her way. T-Dog followed suit, wishing he could give his horse a well deserved kick as he half slid, half fell to the floor.

"Who wants to ride and who wants to drive?" Zxander turned his horse to the remaining five. "I'd say the two least threatening should go along, but I think we're all pretty ugly to be fair."

"Michonne and Bella." Georgie spoke up from the back seat of the truck. "Or Sayid." T-Dog said nothing. Georgie knew these people better than he did, and was probably choosing people she felt closet to or got on with best. He was little more than a tag a long. He wondered if he would have been allowed to come along at all if the Seniors could have spared a map. Dayo nodded.

"Bella and Sayid then."

Once the formalities of directions and handing over the horses was over, T-Dog sparked the engine and (with a large sense of relief) heard it come spluttering back to life. Reversing away from the startled horses, who clearly had placed cars at the back of their memories, and even the cars they could remember probably hadn't sounded like this. As he pulled away, he saw both Bella and Georgie turn to wave at the rest of the group as they become smaller and smaller in his rear view mirror.

It wasn't until they came to just before the hill that concealed the little town, and saw the unnaturally thick black smoke billowing like something out of a factory chimney, bleeding into the otherwise clear blue sky like an oil spill, that T-Dog considered that anything could have gone wrong in his absence. He tried to block it out at first, and pretend that it was coming from somewhere else, but that was useless. Then he tried to rationalize it. Maybe they had just taken down a swarm of walkers. Maybe they were just burning the bodies outside the town walls. That could easily explain the smoke, especially if it was a huge swarm. He tried to hold on to this thought, even forcing himself to consider what they would do if there were still crowds of walkers surrounding the fences. But deep down, something was telling him, nagging at him, telling him something had gone horribly wrong.

For some reason, although he thought of Miao and their unborn child, he wasn't worried about her. He knew he should be, and that she out of their whole group was the most vulnerable, the one who would be at the most risk, and for some reason this was how he knew she would be ok. Their group looked out for each other. They had over and over again risked their lives for each other, they had KILLED for each other. She would have been protected surely. In fact he was sure his group would be somewhere, holding out like they always did.

He was so deeply buried in his thoughts that he didn't hear Sayids yells the first time. It was only when he felt Sayids hands on the steering wheel that he really focused on what was ahead. There, ahead were the gates to the community, and outside them, three large trucks, larger than anything they had in the small town. Surrounding them, figures stumbled around aimlessly. Most were on their hands and knees feeding. A few lay still on the ground.  
T-Dog swerved the truck into the trees, narrowly avoiding crashing, killed the engine and jumped out of the truck. He froze for a moment, unsure of his next action. To rush to the gates was foolish move, from here he couldn't see if they were open or locked, and if they were locked, he wasn't nimble enough to dash back to the cover of the trees without risking a bite. And even if he was, he'd lead the hoard directly to their one means of escape. On the other hand, he was desperate to know what had happened.

It was Bella who broke the silence.

"We should warn the others. They don't know what they'll be walking into." T-Dog felt some sense seeping back into his head.

"The route I send them down, they have to come down this road." He was aware that he and Bella were talking in whispers. Even though the walkers were comfortably far away, this had become the natural state of play. You couldn't treat them like people, who were easily distracted and unfocused. The walkers had one focus: food. And whilst the corpses on the floor would hold their attention for a while they liked to hunt, have their meals so fresh it was still screaming. If you could call dragging their decayed bodies after you hunting. And like any predator, the smallest noise could catch their attention. And in a herd like the one in front of him, they took on a force all of their own, an unstoppable force of nature. Better not to take any risks. He continued, "if one of us goes a little further up the road and heads them off, gets them to travel to the jeep under the cover of the trees, they should be ok."

"Ok. Let's check out the situation and then come back here to decide what to do. One of us should stay with the jeep..."

"No." Georgie cut Sayid off. "We should do this in pairs. Two checking the towns situation, two waiting up the road for the others like you said T-Dog. They might have decided to canter or some crap like that and get here sooner than we thought. And two pairs of eyes are better than one." She spoke with a remarkable amount of calm and for a moment T-Dog thought she had her shit together. Then he noticed how her hands trembled ever so slightly when she reached into the jeep to get her bow.

_"She's as freaked out as I am. But what can we do apart from tackle the problems as they come?"_ he thought.

Bella frowned. "Let me guess, you and T-Dog are going to check the perimeter and we're going to wait for the others?"

"You going to stop us?" Georgie stood loading her bow, back to Bella. She had asked a question, but there was no doubt about what was going to happen.

Bella must have known it too, because she sighed. "Set watches to twelve. We come back here at 1. No later. Decide what to do then." Without another word, she set her watch and moved through the trees. In less than an minute, she had vanished. Sayid looked at T-Dog and Georgie as if he wanted to say something, then shook his head and followed. T-Dog reached under the drivers seat of the truck. The extra pistol and magazines were there, just where he'd left them.

"Ready for this?" Georgie shook her head.

"No. But we both know what the worse could be. So at least we go into this with our eyes open." She reached for his hand and squeezed it briefly. Then they both started to move through the trees.


End file.
